Local Asshole Now Local Asshole With Blog: The Twisted Brain Wrong of a One-Off Man-Mental

Site Meter

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Moonlight on Sewage

New from Carol Rumens: Blind Spots (Seren). On a cursory first dip (though I’ve seen many of its poems before), I think this is something new and very striking for CR to have written. I am especially taken with the long opening sequence, ‘Thinking About Montale by the River Hull’. Montale, readers of Larkin’s letters may remember, was the ‘Eyetie’ whose good fortune in the Stockholm lottery drove Larkin to splutters of indignation, but the arranged marriage between the two (the poems consist of versions and responses to Montale, with occasional ghostings and flittings from Larkin) makes for a combustible mix. These obscure earth-bound flashes are certainly not the fizzles of a wet match, to paraphrase ‘Piccolo Testamento’. From the sequence’s concluding poem, ‘Word Flashes: A Montale Lexicon’:

Goodbye to the stain that was the customs house, goodbyeto foundry, fish-scales, waves: the opera-singerprepares the sails of his voice for a different cosmos.

The students have never heard, nor heard of, Gigli.The tall wheat of the octave is not yet sown.

{Ends}

On another note, I find it thrilling to see Montale’s Ligurian landscapes, which were such a part of his appeal to me when I first read him as a teenager, transplanted to the so seemingly different estuarine sludge of the river Hull, which has become such a sacred site to me in recent years.

I recommend this book warmly.

And on another note again, blogger seems to have cancelled the option for right-justifying paragraphs of prose. Pah!